Listen to my podcast, Pulling the Thread; order my book, On Our Best Behavior, check out my book recs; peruse my blog; or sign-up for my newsletter.

“The real meaning of ‘remember’ is to put the members back together, to make whole. So a lot of times we go back in time to a special time or a special moment and nostalgia is wanting to go back there, as if there's something there that we lost. And the true value of memory is to touch that moment and see where it lives or is dormant in me or you now going forward. That was one form or expression of it, not the only. And that touches on, I think what friendship helps us remember is that life is always where we are. We suffer greatly this–and it has always been, but more so in the modern world–this menacing assumption that life is other than where we are. If it's over there, if I could just get over there, even with a dream, or if I could just accomplish this dream, then. And I think one of the things that almost dying taught me was that there's no there, there's only here.”

“I remember a wonderful psychologist was talking about, we shouldn't, should on ourselves. Don't should on yourself. And it's all of what I should do. And there's a big lie for new moms, which is that when the baby is born, you should take care of the baby. You're the best person. You're the mother. There's no one else who's going to take care of your baby in the same way. And of course you should be holding skin to skin, have the opportunity to breastfeed. But there was never a mother who was expected to take care of her baby without the help of her aunt and her grandmother and her sister and things like that. And if you think about it, in the hospital, there's only one place where we make patients take care of other patients, right?”

“One of the things about practices that I love is this notion of it's not perfect. I haven't got it mastered, just by the very word, it's implied that I'm working it into my life and out of my life and through my life, almost like in my mind, I'm picturing like a woman who's like kneading it into bread dough. And so then there's the room. There's room to play. There's room to set it aside for a time. There's room to reimagine some of these practices. There's room to expand our notions of belonging and spirituality and faithfulness of our place in the world. And then that to me then opened up and almost reintroduced some of those things that maybe I had once rejected. And thought, well, there's no room for me here. And whether it's prayer, or generosity, or whatever else, it's like, no, I think that there's some good practices here. And I think there's a way to do this in a way that looks like being for things instead of just against things like we already talked about. But then what does it look like to have some room for mistakes and for learning and for humility? And even some play, I think.”

“You can't be independent if you're not deeply connected. So what happens to a child that's not deeply connected? What actually happens? Guess what happens? They don't feel the confidence to be able to take risks. They don't feel the confidence to go out and be self-sufficient. They don't feel the confidence in doing it. So we're actually backbiting, right? We're kicking ourselves in the asses when we just focus on independence. Because we need to give them the skills to be able to be independent, which are relational skills, which is knowing that when I need help, I can turn to you and you will help me and I will help you when you need it. So then you can go off and take a risk or go and live in a new city or go have your own apartment and know that you can lean on me when you need to. And so to me, the attachment story that comes out, at this point, almost a century of research on attachment is a gorgeous, gorgeous story.”

“Our anger is ‘I'm angry because something happened that I feel was unjust or unfair’ And if it continues, then I want my justice and you know, our injustices from childhood turn out to be society's burdens because I want payback here, even though you had nothing to do with it. So, hate and love go together because they're both strongly bonding connection, right? But really bond us in order to hate you, I've got to feel a lot about you, right? You did something to betray me, to violate me, to say, no, I can't do this, whatever it is. And so both are really strongly bonded, you know, just like anger is bonding. When we're angry with each other, it's a way to stay bonded and connected, even though it's unpleasant.”

“So when we think about this, what is the aura? Many people have an idea of the aura as something that is around you and a lovely bubble or sphere of energy. Maybe you've seen pictures of\an egg shape, but what's really important to understand about the aura is that it comes from inside you and it's only as strong as your vitality. So you can think about the aura as essentially being a vibrational field that is being vibrated out of your cells. So now how are your cells? Are you eating in ways that really activate your body system or not? Are you living in ways that support your vitality or not?”

What optogenetics does is it's an engine of discovery. It helps us identify what matters, what's causing things to happen in the brain. And we know now the cells and the connections make these powerful motivations and drives manifest. That opens the door to any kind of new treatment, right? If you know the cells, then you can look at the DNA and the RNA in those cells. You can see what proteins those cells are making, and that gives you clues for medication targets. You can say, okay, this cell has these proteins on its surface, that would give us an idea for a pill, for a medication that might act specifically on that cell that now we know for the first time is causal. It's not just correlated with, it's actually causing these symptoms or the resolution of these symptoms. And if we can now design a medication that targets that cell, we might have a treatment.

“All growing up stages are the product of scientific investigation of the stages of growing up that people go through. And those are all defined in third person terms because they're the person or thing being spoken about. When we talk about the archaic stage or the magic stage or the mythic stage, if you look within right now, you can't see any of those stages. As a matter of fact, before we had this conversation, you had no idea that you had all these six to eight stages of growing up that you will go through. You didn't know anything about those because you can't see them. They're not first person or even second person phenomena. They're third person, the person or thing being spoken about.”

“I really think that the past, we can go back to it and we definitely learn lessons because I'm always a hindsight person. So in hindsight, I'm always thinking that, okay, what could I have done better? But the past experiences for me, I've learned as I've gotten older, is to grab the lesson. And hopefully there's a blessing in there too. And then move on. I used to stay stuck in the past and try to understand why, why, why, why, why I would spend so much time, Elise, that I'm never getting back or why did this person do that? Why did this happen? Why did they treat me this way? And really try to unpack all of their baggage. And what I've learned is the “why” doesn't even really matter. It's, you know, what is the lesson for me? What is the lesson for my soul that I need right now?”

“I think we need each other. I say this all the time, there are some things that are too big to feel in one body. You need a collective body to move them through. And I think that's what we need. We need to come together in spaces to heal, not just to consume together or to watch a movie together, but to feel together and to have human emotion in real life, in public and act from the place of a feeling body, to choose action from a feeling body and not just a reactive or a numb body, but a body that feels, a body that can connect. What kind of actions do you take in the world from that kind of body? I think it's different.”